Kultur Ensemble
European cooperation
Kultur Ensembles, Franco-German cultural institutes, set an example internationally with regard to strengthening European cooperation. In the autumn of 2023, a German-French duo of artists took place in the residence programme “Atelier Panormos” by the Kultur Ensemble in Palermo. We spoke to Annika Katja Boll and Renaud Mundabi Muyanunu about their experiences there.
By Alexander Behrmann
Can you still remember the first day of your residence in Palermo?
Annika Katja Boll: Palermo is a very active, dynamic and loud city. It drew us in from our first glance into a fascinating blend of fireworks every evening, vibrant markets and overwhelming traffic. However, for me as a visual artist who mainly works with her eyes, the hybrid architecture in Palermo quickly captured my imagination: As well as spectacular moments, it was mainly simple house facades which seemed to store their long and colourful history in their patchwork pattern of different stones and layers of materials that captured my imagination. These initial impressions shifted my previous focus from botanical research to a more archaeological interest in material constructions and stone formations, which significantly shaped the work which we created.
Renaud Mundabi Muyanunu: I remember the mountains and the old palm trees in a really bright landscape.
What impression did you get when you heard about Renaud Mundabi Muyanunu’s sound art for the first time?
Boll: Renaud and I studied together at Villa Arson in Nice. We already understood each other’s artistic work and the personal evolution that had led to it but we had not yet found an opportunity to bring a project to life together. At first glance, his musical work with its spherical, heavy or even threatening sounds is at odds with the aesthetics of my playful and colourful landscapes. At the same time, Renaud’s work contains a stronger narrative component and my work leaves more room for interpretation. It was these contrasts that made a cooperation so interesting for us.
How were both of your styles of art able to benefit from each other?
Muyanunu: I was inspired by the conversations we had. We spoke a lot about our interpretations, impressions and personal perspectives.
Boll: The cooperation with Renaud helped me to add precision to my more abstract work on landscapes and visual systems: This led to the creation of specific places to provide a home for his compositions. At the same time his musical narrations were broken up, opened up and influenced by being embedded in my spacious, extended scenes.
When the public gets to view the end result of your work together: What exactly will they experience, see or hear?
Boll: The result of our cooperation is an interactive game. Viewers can move freely using a joystick at five different levels. Every level is inspired by a region or a precise location in Sicily, such as Etna, the sandy beach at Mondello or the Botanical Gardens in Palermo. Multiple sound landscapes are placed within each scene, which are a mixture of field recordings, recordings of traditional instruments and minimalist electronic sounds which colour the scenes with their ambience and sometimes abruptly alter the scenes. The locations create déjà vu moments for the local public and at the same time offer a visual and acoustic journey in an abstraction of the Sicilian landscape. The game aims at providing an experience of liminality, a state between confusing disorientation and pleasant aimlessness.
Muyanunu: This varies a lot from person to person, primarily because the project is intended to ask the viewer to make a decision. They can move around the virtual space and discover the music through the landscape or vice versa.
How has the audience reacted?
Boll: Our presentation at the festival “Walls of Sound” was the first real opportunity to showcase our work outside the context of our art university. The heterogeneity of the audience was very refreshing: from children who wanted to explore the landscapes with the joystick straight after the performance and an older audience who became fascinated with new media and its computer game aesthetics to the residents of Palermo who were able to rediscover familiar places in Sicily in a digitalised world.
To what extend did the residence influence your work?
Muyanunu: It strengthened my relationship with sound recordings and my love of travel. It was an extremely interesting experience and had lots of different impressions and we met really great artists who were also connected to the residence programme.
Boll: I think it is extremely important to change the context in which you studied and in which you work from time to time. I already had this experience because I studied in Germany and France. It is amazing how different discussions and approaches to understanding art are, even within neighbouring European countries. The exchange opens up different perspectives and new opportunities, opens doors and creates lasting contacts. Primarily as a young artist, I can say that the residence period helped me to make my approach more professional.
In 2019, the Chancellor at the time, Angela Merkel, and French President Emmanuel Macron signed a new bilateral cooperation agreement, the Aachen Treaty. One of the aspects it covered was the creation of Franco-German cultural institutes. The development of the Kultur Ensembles in the network of the Goethe-Institut was organised by the Goethe-Institut, the Federal Foreign Office and the French Foreign Ministry in partnership. The first Kultur Ensembles started their work in Palermo, Ramallah and Atlanta. The network was expanded in 2024 with locations in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, and Glasgow. In addition, plans for 2025 include openings in Erbil (autonomous region of Kurdistan in Iraq), with the celebratory cornerstone ceremony having already taken place, and in Córdoba in Argentina.
The Atelier Panormos - La Bottega in Palermo is the first German-French-Italian residence programme. The artists’ residence provides time and space to research and work and for artistic research within the framework of German-French projects in the capital of Sicily. The residence programme was founded in 2021 and received support with curation from Chiara Parisi, Director of the Centre Pompidou-Metz, and Andrea Lissoni, Artistic Director at Haus der Kunst in Munich.